Hugh Thomson: The Colin Firth of Jane Austen Illustrators

Photo courtesy of Chawton House Library

Hugh Thomson's monumental contributions to visualizing Jane Austen's fiction and characters are described in The Making of Jane Austenin Part One, Chapter Three.

He continues to be the most famous and best known—and even when unknown, the illustrator whose work is most seen—among Austen's artists. That's why I compare him to Colin Firth. It's difficult to conceive of a future artist having a longer-lasting influence on how generations of readers imagined Austen's characters and scenes!

Thomson completed 160 separate drawings for the best-selling 1894 Pride and Prejudice edition published by George Allen. He illustrated Austen's other novels for the publisher Macmillan & Co. later in the 1890s.

The entirety of the Allen/Thomson Peacock edition is available online at Archive.org, for free download, in case you want to inspect all of its art. (I talk about just a few of his images in my book.)

The other four volumes of Thomson's Austen illustrations from Macmillan are available through the British Library for free download: Sense & Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Northanger Abbey/Persuasion. It was Macmillan's tradition in this series to feature the illustrator's name (and not the author's) on the front cover of the book. Austen's name does, however, appear on the spine of the Macmillan edition, naming her as its author.

Thomson's illustrations continue to appear today on t-shirts, tote bags, postcards, and puzzles. In 1976, six Thomson images were even featured in silver plate!